I know that a lot of people feel helpless because it's the big corporations that are emitting, but companies only emit CO2 if consumers pay them to do so.
Buying everything consciously, whether its food, appliances, housing, or a ticket to some performance, will make the world better.
We're in the process of moving home and putting everything into boxes makes one realize how much crap one has bought unnecessarily.
We're on a relatively special case in that we've only recently moved (18 months ago) so we actually have stuff that has never been used in our current house. A lot of this stuff has been donated to charity and some tossed but still my gf wants to take some stuff that hasn't been used in at least 18 months to the new house.
I am excluding Tools and camping gear from the list. The former for obvious reasons, the latter due to having recently had a baby we've not been camping for a bit, YMMV
There is no way out of this that doesn't involve a "lot of people doing" something. Our lifestyles are just not sustainable.
Essentially, you're never going to drive car use down (and, thereby, fossil fuel use), if there are no viable alternatives than using a car and the poorest areas can't afford to "catch-up" to the electic vehicle trend[s].
Yes, the effect might be miniscule, compared to the output of CO^2 by businesses, but every little bit helps - when deforestation continues in the Amazon (e.g.: "the world's lungs") and we're not planting enough trees (anywhere) to counter-act that.
Globally it looks like we're not doing that bad. There are areas doing worse (Africa, Latin America), but the trend seems ok even for them.
>However, deforestation is the second-leading cause of climate change after burning fossil fuels and accounts for nearly 20 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions — more than the world’s entire transport sector.
How can we be doing "not that bad" and it be the second-leading cause? These do not equate.
[0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20190627040941/http://www.fao.or...
For example - it's insane how the Miami real estate prices ignore what's going on (they even have a cheerful name - "sunny day floods"): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MIXRNSA Just sell it already! There's nothing good waiting for Miami, the city will die. Rent if you really want to stay till it blows up.
As far as stocks go many companies do not publish data on how climate change will impact them. But they probably will, soon, and ETFs will follow suit: https://www.economist.com/business/2019/02/21/business-and-t...
Of course for the worst case scenario (hundreds of millions of refugees from dried up / flooded places) no assets management strategy will help, as this will be a world-war impact event.
This was all covered in detail in the press at the time the problem first started occurring, and of course it made everyone involved look really bad. But then someone came up with "climate change" as the cause instead, so now the guilty parties had something to hide behind. The press had a field day with it, too, using it as "proof" of dangerously rising sea levels.
The attempted solution here (which is why I said "was?") was to install drainage pumps much like the type you find in New Orleans, because apparently going back and adding the proper back-flow prevention devices was going to be too involved and too expensive. But, of course, just as soon as those pumps were activated people started complaining about how they were polluting the ocean. In fact, they probably aren't putting anything into the ocean that wasn't already going there eventually anyway; they just made the situation more obvious.
There are now frequent periods where you have to boil your water before you can use it, and it floods in a hard rain which didn't really happen 10 years ago.
I guess what I am saying is I don't believe you, and most of New Orleans going into the ocean as well.
New Orleans and Miami will just slowly deteriorate over time and people will stop investing in these places because it isn't worth the flood risks. Eventually New Orleans will really just be a tourist destination. The French Quarter and probably some of uptown around St. Charles will survive unless things get really bad.
And why not? You could, you know, lift a finger and go check out for yourself the relevant local news reports about the current and past situation, but you have to go back a few years now to see how it all actually got started.
And pretty much all of coastal Louisiana is naturally subsiding (sinking) anyway. (The same is true for Texas, BTW, including much of its interior.) Flood control projects built on the Mississippi River over the past century have made the problem far more readily apparent today than it would otherwise be.
New Orleans has been losing its natural protection of the wet lands and barrier islands for decades, exacerbated by the oil companies digging trenches in the wetlands to speed up their demise.
Louisiana has been losing land for a long time, and it is concealed in maps by the local government.
In the last 80 years louisiana has lost 1900 square miles of land to the ocean.
https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/boot-no-more-a-wetter-map-...
The problem isn't only mismanagement. That is just one of many problems that are causing failing infrastructure throughout the city.
What the poster above said about Miami is probably somewhat true, in that mismanagement is one of the issues of why Miami is flooding as well. But it isn't the only problem and it isn't even the main issue these cities are facing.
It will only become more expensive to maintain these flood protections in the future, and create more opportunities for greater corruption as well.
https://fixathon.io/ <-- looking for sponsorship if any tech companies are feeling generous (https://bit.ly/fixathon-sponsor)
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/
Really, it's stupid, but if the politicians can ignore you, they will. You have to make it so they can't ignore you.
The key thing is to work with your neighbors, friends, and community to build on the movements that are already working to make politicians and countries change. This must be a collective effort.
Bigger cities are following too including New York and Sydney today.
We live in a finite world consuming like it is infinite
Every action counts, but it will be hard and it must be super reinforced by law
The Australian electoral system is first past the post too and is similarly as chaotic as the UK.
In practice this probably means you feel more like your vote matters, but eventually goes to one of the major parties.